Casino co. would spend "north of $200M" to build slots, hotel in Worcester

Thursday

Mar 14, 2013 at 7:00 PMMar 14, 2013 at 10:44 PM

By John J. Monahan TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Greg Carlin, CEO of Rush Street Gaming, the Chicago-based casino company looking to build a slots casino and hotel in Worcester, plans to visit the city next week to talk about the project, which he said could involve an investment of more than $200 million.

“We are super-excited about this opportunity,” Mr. Carlin said. He hopes to win a four-way competition for the only slot casino license being awarded by the state under the expanded gaming law.

A subsidiary of Rush Street Gaming, Massachusetts Gaming & Entertainment LLC, has submitted a $400,000 license application fee to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, but has not yet officially notified the commission of the site it has chosen for the facility.

However, Worcester City Manager Michael V. O'Brien earlier this week told the City Council that the company will pursue a site in Worcester and it was learned that the site under consideration is the former Wyman Gordon plant site in the Green Island section of the city.

“I'm not at liberty to talk about our site yet,” Mr. Carlin said in a telephone interview today, but he said final plans will be in place to do so in the coming days.

“By next week we will be able to disclose our site and our plans,” Mr. Carlin said. “We are going to do a hotel as part of the project” and the total investment is expected to be “north of $200 million,” including a casino with 1,200 slot machines, he said.

The Worcester proposal will compete against three other slot casino plans for the license set to be awarded by the commission later this year. Both the former greyhound racetrack in Raynham and the Plainridge Racecourse harness racing facility in Plainville are submitting bids for a slots casino. A fourth company bidding for the slot license, PPE Casino Resorts, has not identified where it will propose a facility.

Mr. Carlin, whose company has built casinos in Canada and the United States in recent years, said his company has experience siting gaming facilities in urban areas and believes the project will be well suited to Worcester.

“There are some very worthy competitors for the Category 2 license, but we think we have a great chance. We have never lost one of these processes,” Mr. Carlin said of the competition.

“We are looking forward to meeting people and telling people what it means to have a casino in town,” he said. Aware that some people may have “a negative perception” of casino impacts, he said he wants to talk about how the project would work in Worcester.

He said in other cities where the company has introduced gaming, people have worried about traffic and crime, and he is looking forward to dispelling some of those notions. He said in 2010, when the company planned its most recent casino development, in an urban environment in Philadelphia, the Sugarhouse Casino, residents were concerned about those very issues, but “none of those concerns have materialized.”

“We can really integrate this into a community and leverage the community” in terms of encouraging casino patrons to take advantage of other amenities in Worcester, Mr. Carlin said.

He said the closest casino in size that the company has built is the Rivers Casino in Des Plaines, Ill., a city outside Chicago of about 58,000 population. That casino opened in 2009, five miles from O'Hare International Airport. It has 1,200 gaming positions, including 1,044 slot machines, 48 tables and seven restaurants, employing 1,300 full-time workers.

Reports of the Worcester proposal have raised immediate concerns in the Green Island neighborhood closest to the site. Residents and businesses are working to revitalize that area of the city and hope to see segments of the historic Blackstone Canal uncovered as part of a heritage park focusing on the city's industrial past.

John Giangregorio, president of the Canal District Alliance and the Canal District Business Association, said word of the company's interest in Worcester has raised possibilities that it could contribute to the revitalization of that part of the city and may enhance plans to open parts of the canal along Harding Street to give the area a landmark historic site.

Depending on how a slot parlor is developed and whether it is designed to be integrated within the heritage site, restaurants and entertainment venues along Green Street, Harding Street and around Kelley Square, it could help or hurt revitalization efforts, he said.

“There is an opportunity to bring a lot of people into the area with discretionary money to spend. The challenge is how do we get the casino slot parlor patrons to spend money in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Giangregorio, who owns the Three G's Sports Bar on Millbury Street. “If I could take a walk to the old canal, stop and have a beer at the Banner or catch a show at night at the Lucky Dog that is one way we could take advantage.”

He said the canal restoration project cost is pegged at about $17 million, but he has tried to make the case that higher property values and other benefits would repay the city for the investment over 20 years.